SEO Blog

Do you really need to get rid of flash on your site?

I’ve written about the demise of Flash in this blog as long as 10 years ago. It’s been a slow process, but it looks like it’s finally on its death bed.

The news is not good.

Recent news about the Adobe Flash platform for audio and video web content is not good. Google says it’s working hard to “make sure the web is ready to be Flash-free.” Already by default Flash doesn’t work on mobile or Chrome and having it on your site may be a negative ranking factor as a result.

This morning, Adobe announced its roadmap to stop supporting Flash at the end of 2020. Working with Adobe and other browser vendors, Mozilla has prepared a roadmap for Flash support in Firefox, and guides for site authors to make their final transition away from Flash technology.

Does that mean we have until 2020 to remove Flash content?

Google is making HTML5 the preferred and default way to display website content in a change that’ll take place over the next couple of months. This means that unless a website has an HTML5 content player, video content will not automatically display. All Flash content will be blocked, unless users manually enable it on a site-by-site basis. [Emphasis added]

Adobe has reportedly ceased development of Flash for all mobile devices, so industry watchers like LifeWire agree that it’s close to 100% certain that Flash will never be available on the iPhone. If you want your audio, video or animations to work on an iPhone, Flash is out of the question.

The Google Play store isn’t supporting Flash for Android devices. That means that if you install a Flash player from elsewhere for your phone you won’t be able to get any bug fixes or updates .

Page Speed Affects Your Search Rankings and Conversions

When it comes to your website slow speed kills rankings and conversions.

What is Page Speed?

Page speed refers to how quickly a page on your website downloads into a visitor’s browser or phone. It can be measured a few ways. Google and some other sources report a score for your speed on a scale of 0-100. Others display it in seconds.

You can measure page speed a few ways:

Time to First Byte (how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte from the web server

Page Load Time (how long it takes to fully display the page)

Above the Fold Time (how long it takes to fully display as much as you can see without scrolling down)

However you measure it, faster is always better.

Page Speed and Google

I’ve written before about how a slow page speed can hurt your rankings in search results. Google has explicitly stated that how quickly a site loads into a browser is now a ranking factor. All other things being equal, a faster site will outrank a slower site.

Google scores your site separately for download to a desktop/laptop computer and for a phone. It’s quite common for those to get very different download speed scores. And mobile speeds are usually slower than desktop speeds.

Mobile Speed is Increasingly Important

Google is moving toward a mobile-first index, which means that the information they know about your website comes from the mobile version of your site, not the desktop version. Those two may be the same for a responsive site, but some websites actually have differing amounts of information between the two, usually with the mobile speed being slower. Since Google is now focusing on the mobile version of your website, it stands to reason that the page speed it measures on a phone is more important than the speed it measures for a desktop/laptop computer.

Page Speed and Your Visitors

There’s another equally important reason to pay attention to your download speed: visitors. We are all increasingly stressed over time and as a result have less patience for watching a slow web page load in our computer. If your page is too slow, visitors may leave before the page ever loads for them. If they find you in search, become impatient and immediately go back to the search results to select something else, Google makes note of that as a black mark against your page. That will negatively affect your rankings moving forward.

Needless to say, the more people who abandon your website, the fewer conversions (converting visitors to paying customers) you will see.

Compared to a page with a two-second page speed, one that takes six seconds can expect to lose 25% of its visitors to abandonment.

Back in 2010 I said your probably don’t need an XML sitemap.

Well, it’s time to re-think that.

An XML sitemap is a coded page or several pages that visitors to your site don’t see, but which search engines definitely do. It’s a list of every page on your website that can show search engines some extra information about your website. It indicates how recently each page has been changed or updated, how often each page changes, and how important each page is.

Technically, you shouldn’t need an XML sitemap if your website is set up properly with impeccable site structure and thorough, easy-to-follow navigation that covers every page on your site. But if you’ve overlooked anything at all, an XML sitemap will compensate for that by showing Google, Yahoo & Bing all of the pages on your site. Here’s a little more on that.

An XML sitemap doesn’t just cover your rear end in case your navigation is less than perfect. The additional information it provides allows search engines to crawl your site more intelligently.

Help is readily available.

Don’t worry that you need to laboriously code up an XML site map. There are a number of services that can create one for you. And if your website has been created in WordPress, the Yoast SEO plug-in will do it for you automatically.

The Bottom Line

Just go ahead and do it.

Join the conversation – let us know your experience in the comments below.

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Online reputation management can be a daunting prospect to deal with on your own. We can help! Ask me about our PowerListings Ultimate service that can help generate positive reviews and focus them where you want, even on your own website.

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Oh, No! You got a bad review on Google!

We’ve got good news and bad news when it comes to removing negative Google reviews. Let’s start with the bad news. The bad news is that you can’t actually “get rid” of a bad online review.

Don’t stop reading!

The good news is there are ways that you can combat any negative online reviews you get — on Google and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the truth is, Google doesn’t care about your business or your reputation. They just want to give customers what they are looking for so that Google stays the top search engine. All so they can continue to have people pay them to advertise on their network. At the end of the day, they aren’t going to care if you got a review that makes you look bad when you didn’t do anything wrong. There is nothing they can do about it, or, we should say … there’s nothing that they will do about it.

But, wait. Should you even care if you have negative reviews? Absolutely! Online reviews are very important in today’s market. More and more people are turning to reviews to help decide their purchases. In fact, 93% of Millennials say that they read reviews before they purchase something.

Think about it—wouldn’t you trust what your friend said about a new restaurant over what the restaurant says about themselves? Just because they say they have the best burritos in the city doesn’t mean they’re worth trying. They might be awful. That’s why you ask around, to see if anyone you know has been there before you go. This is what online reviews do for consumers. They allow them to get information from a third party before they spend their money.

As a business, you want online reviews. You want your happy customers to tell others about your company and your products/services. But what happens when you get a not so nice review? Well, you need to address it! Having a negative review about your company floating around out there can turn away potential customers. So, how do you combat these reviews if you can’t just get rid of them?

Here are seven tactics you can try.

Look internally

The first thing that we would recommend you do when you get a bad online review is to seriously consider what the review is saying. Put yourself in the shoes of the reviewer. Maybe they’re just being unreasonable, but they just might be showing you a real problem with your service.

Take a hard look at your company. You want to try to see things from the other side, not through your own rose-colored glasses. Maybe it’s time to rethink some of your processes or your customer service.

Contact the reviewer ASAP

After getting a bad online review, you want to contact that person as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter who’s wrong in the situation. You need to reach out to them. Even if they’re wrong, you want to do everything in your power to make it right somehow. The more you do to make it right, the more they’ll appreciate it and rethink their review.

Think of this as an investment into your reputation. Just reaching out can do a lot to repair relationships and help them view you more favorably. Even if you can’t make things right with them, reaching out and trying to make things right will show other potential customers that you care.

Ask for a revision of the bad review

After you reach out to the reviewer and try to make things right, consider thinking about asking them to revise their review. A customer can revise their review, remove the review or even post a follow-up. Now, this would be ideal if you made the situation better for them and they were genuinely happy with your response. However, if they don’t seem happy even after you reach out, it might be not ideal to ask them. They might just write something worse or something else that could further damage your online reputation.

Acknowledge the problem

We’ve already told you that you need to reach out to the reviewer and try to make things right with them. However, there are times when you just can’t make it up to them. It might be that it was a time-sensitive situation and you just can’t make that situation right.

You still need to acknowledge what happened. Make sure you apologize for the experience they had and try to do everything you can to assure them it won’t happen again. Tell them that you are going to review your policies and maybe even ask for a second chance to make it up to them.

Whatever you do, make sure you are always pleasant with the customer. There is no need to be rude or short with them; if you reply with iritation it’s counterproductive, especially if you respond that way online. Be nice and genuine with them. Sometimes, just acknowledging a problem can show them that you respect them and their experience.

Address false reviews

There are normal negative reviews, and then there are just false reviews. Maybe you have a testy former employee who is out for revenge or maybe a ruthless competitor is trying to steal your business. In situations like that, you need to address those reviews with the site they’re on.

Get Positive

As we’ve said, you can expect a few negative reviews. And, honestly, they aren’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, some people will find it a little fake if you only have glowing reviews. Most of the time, your potential customers are going to have the common sense to read a negative review and understand that some people are just grumpy or looking for attention.

What can really help with this is having more positive reviews that will overshadow the negative ones. If you have a hundred positive reviews and two negative ones, most people will see that you are generally liked.

If you currently don’t have positive reviews, then you need to work on getting them ASAP. But how do you get positive reviews? There are ways that you can encourage your customers to review you:

Ask Them: You can always ask your customers to review you. However, you need to be careful. According to Google’s guidelines, you can’t offer any incentives for reviews.

POP Display: Create point of purchase displays that ask them to review you. Make sure you first identify the top places that your customers come in contact with you.

Email Them: You can use your email marketing to help you gain reviews. You can email them and ask by putting a link at the bottom of your email.

Frequent Flyers: Ask those who are repeat customers. If they keep coming back to you, chances are that they like you and will be glad to leave you a review.

Social Media: You can ask your followers on social media to review you, but you want to make sure that you don’t make it too easy to also leave negative reviews.

If you can’t beat them, outrank them

If you find that you have a negative review on just one site, you can work on outranking that site and pushing them down the SERPs. Obviously, for this to work, you need to have positive reviews on other sites. In order to make this work, link to the positive reviews on your website and social media. Then, start doing a little undercover promotion of these sites.

Even better might be to outrank their review with new positive reviews on the same site. Those will appear above the bad review and if you get enough of them they might even push the negative review off the page.

Online Reputation Management

Online reputation management is defined as “a strategy and process of monitoring, identifying, and influencing your digital reputation and credibility online.” By now I’m confident you understand that you need to know what people are saying about you online. Your reputation is everything, in today’s competitive market. With more and more people trusting reviews, you really need to be paying attention to what people are saying about you online.

Monitoring your digital reputation and what people are saying about you online idn’t just about combating the bad online reviews. While that’s a great part of it, you can also gain insightful information from online reputation management: it gives you the ability to understand and benefit from what people are saying about you.

Say you are a plumbing company in Atlanta who’s monitoring tweets with [Plumbing + Atlanta], and you see that people are complaining that no other company will service a certain area. You might realize it really wouldn’t take much to go to that area. Now you’ve tapped into a brand new market and outsmarted your competition.

Conclusion

Don’t think it’s the end of the world when you get a bad online review. One or two aren’t going to kill your business, but you do need to be mindful of the customer and the situation. Make sure you contact them and do everything you can to make it right. Sometimes, just showing you care can make all the difference.

Thanks to Ron Dod for this post and for his patience with my gentle editing. He’s a partner and CEO of Visiture, LLC. After founding Grey Umbrella Marketing, an internet marketing agency which focuses on SEO for eCommerce businesses, he merged with Visiture to create a full service search marketing offering including PPC for eCommerce businesses. He holds a Masters in the Science of Marketing from Florida State University and is certified in Google Adwords & Analytics.

Think we can benefit with your experience with bad online reviews? Please share in the comments below.

Think others can benefit from the information here? Please share it with the buttons on the left. Or give us a +1 or a Like at the top of the page.

Average Rating:

4.9

Total Number of Reviews:

9

September 07, 2017

Teri D

Bill- Had a client call yesterday who was frustrated with another agent in the area; seemed inattentive and wasn't willing to help. She located three other agents within 20 miles. Interestingly, I was the furthest away, however, I had the best reviews online, so she chose to contact our agency and do business with us! Am so grateful for your constant reminders about getting great reviews and high rankings. It works!!!

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Rank Magic, LLC

Thanks for this, Teri! Those review stars in Google listings really catch the eye and the actual review writeups generate trust. I'm thrilled this is working so well for you.

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April 14, 2017

Laurel L.

Timely, personalized customer service, excellent support.

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Rank Magic, LLC

Thanks, Laurel! I'm pleased our work is bringing you new business. Please call me if you have any questions.

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February 28, 2017

Vincent C.

Rank Magic has raised my firm's visibility on the Web. Their newsletter is top-notch and their customer service is fast, responsive and accurate. And they provide all this service at reasonable cost.